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Life, Education and Information Overload

This week there were two readings for the final week of class. The first was “The Tigger Talk: On LIfe, the Process, and Everything” by Brad King: The Appalachian Geek. He starts by writing “grades don’t matter,” which honestly nearly made me fall out of my chair since my mom was a teacher and in our house, grades did matter.

Instead King says, it’s the process that matters because in failure we learn. He mentions that 10 years from now not many of us will remember our friends or what happened in each of our college classes. Instead, we will be working hard, staying in and being too tired to make those important decisions in life.

Let’s move on to talking about Eeyore. Yes, you know the type. That one person who is all about sadness and drama. King talks about who these people and why they became that way. Hopefully you don’t travel down the same road. King’s post reminds us that life isn’t about the big events, it is all about the small events. What’s more, we don’t have control over these events. Yet, we do have control over how we see and how we react to such events. This leads us to the idea that we all want to be Tigger. We want to think positively and move through life thinking about the process, instead of the grade.

The other article I read was “10 Questions for Journalists” by Matt Thompson. I’m going to cover just a couple of them since you really should click the link and read the article in its entirety.

#1 – Are we making our community feel better-informed or merely distracted?

Here Thompson discusses how the design and layout of a page are essential to whether the community will be distracted or if the page can work to inform. Deliberate choices are important.

#2 – How important is this for our community and why?

This brings up the important question of immediacy vs. importance. Here Thompson labels local traffic as cheap, or the one-night-stand traffic. He instead wants a relationship with his visitors; for his visitors to see the value.

#3 – Are we chasing the largest story, or just the latest story?

The larger story is more important and respond to actual events, instead of just time.